Structural editing is about saying “No!” to make the book leaner, more streamlined, better to read. Field Notes of the Metaverse started out as a book in three parts: The history of the metaverse, the narratives of the metaverse and voices of the metaverse. The last part was the first one to go, based on…

The last eight weeks were a gruesome series of discussing wordings, phrasing, intentions and if they were defensible. First and foremost, “Field Notes of the Metaverse” is not a book of predictions. There already are a lot of books on potential futures of the metaverse. I want to explicitly set it apart by only discussing…

Carla went through the book and suggested multiple changes to the structure. Importantly, she identified some topics and themes I only described in passing, but really deserve their own chapter. One is the concepts around paratext and metagames. I mentioned them all over the place, mostly in the Field Notes chapters, but that also made…

As mentioned in the previous field log, the book is currently in structural and copy editing by the wonderful Carla Cook. While I am currently enjoying a long break from the book project, she is busy reading through it and leaving a trail of notes. Mostly “Cut this!” and “Cut that!” After the initial irritation…

James is done. Ok, to be fair he has been done fact checking the book for 2+ months now, but it took a while to incorporate all his feedback. Which means, it’s time now to: Structural & Copy Edit

As you might have peeked, the early drafts of my book on the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds had a chapter on Microsoft HoloLens. And why not – it’s easily one of the most influential Mixed Reality platforms of all time. But when I gave the book to my technical editor, James, he…

In December 2023, I left Microsoft. One of the projects I embarked on was writing this book about the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse and virtual worlds. I had already written many articles on the topic and a lot of you asked me to formalize it into a book. This week, I hit…

I have reached the final section. After showing all the history and establishing a model how to analyze and interpret metaverse narratives, I am now applying all this to a large sample size of different metaverse narratives to identify clusters based around a common perspective or assumptions. The result is a landscape of narratives, from…

I started this project in earnest in December 2023. At that point I had copied over all relevant blog articles, presentations and notes into a Word document, organized into a very rough outline. Since then I have added, rewritten, edited and restructured the contents many times, keeping a steady progress. Looking at the pure word…

I just cracked the 150k! To be honest, I don’t have a word budget for the book. It will have as much words as it needs. And I absolutely expect the editors to throw a good chunk out to make it more streamlined. In fact, they are already doing it. On the side I have…

49 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. That may not sound like good progress from the 41 chapters I reported two weeks ago, but I’m very happy with it. The last chapters were all chapters in the section about how mobile phones and other physical tokens created new interfaces into virtuality. And to be…

I am happily typing away and 41 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. This included a couple of chapters that needed significant restructuring. I already knew that I had been sloppy writing the chapters on the Web area, but I really didn’t do a great job on those. I guess my biggest issue is…

I am in the process of going through every chapter, unifying the tone and style of the book, and making sure that there is a logical flow from chapter to chapter and section to section. This is my last pass before handing it over to the editors, and so far 31 of 75 chapters are…

It has been a year since I decided to embark on this silly side quest. And so far, playing a full-time author has been awesome. As I dug deep into the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds, I encountered a lot of interesting stories buried in old newsgroups, articles long taken down, and in books…

The book already talked a lot about D&D, but only in the surrounding chapters. I talked about how D&D as a trend opened up the space for exploring metaphorical worlds, as well as the shift to personally step into these metaphors. In the field notes chapters I also talked about the impact that D&D had…

The Microsoft Word app for mobile has this really neat “Read Aloud” feature that recently got a update with new (and finally good sounding) voices. Last week I loaded in my current draft and listened through it

I added the chapter about True Names by Vernor Vinge as the first milestone in the book. Previously I talked about it in a paragraph as a precursor to cyberpunk, which is true but never felt right. It always felt more important than just a couple of words. And as I completed the chapters on…

I feel a certain amount of kinship with Dan Olsen. We might be the same age, although I doubt it. And I did not go to film school. Better known as Folding Ideas, Dan has published this monumental, gargantuan documentary about the metaverse called “The Future is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse”. There’s…

This week I have been working a lot on the “Field Notes” chapters. I have been pushing and prodding at them for a while and while they started out as “one chapter per section,” at some point they fragmented into many smaller chapters. It felt neater to carve them up into separate topics and concepts,…

Writing is hard. As with projects in general, the 80/20 rule also applies to writing books. It feels like I am 80% there for the book, and I am starting to struggle with the last 20%. I am all over the place, can’t focus on a single chapter or section, and it feels like I…

Last week I focused on virtual world economics. While I love writing and talking about this, I am struggling how to best weave the topic into the book. It’s easy to go into too much detail about game design, balancing, and concepts like “fairness”. Then into monetarization in general how this might connect the virtual…

Coming back to writing after a 5 week vacation break is never easy. Of course I read a lot and made notes during that time, but I took a deliberate break from looking at the script to get some distance and hopefully have a fresh look when returning. This has worked as far as I…

This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.Current book word count: 96,848 Summer vacation is over. Back to writing! ✍️🗣️⌨️💪🙌

The last week or so I have been working on the overall structure of the book. I read through everything to see if there are gaps anywhere, or if some sections feel too padded.

I wanted to work on other things, but somehow I felt like doing the chapter around the crypto casino. And I’m glad I did because it really helped me draw a clear line between the casino side of crypto, and the original aspirations and visions around cryptocurrencies, NFT’s, and Web3. It now feels like they…

I wrote a lot about the Web 2.0 / Webified Metaverse era, which really are feel-good chapters for me. I think back fondly at this time, remembering the good vibes, the positive outlook on the Web, the collaboration, the barcamps and so on. And it’s interesting to look back where we were right about things,…

I really need to clean up this blog. I want to do a new about page with the updated pitch & abstract for the book. The structure-page also needs an update. Maybe I should create a dedicated page for both, not just a post.

I am still hacking away at the Web3-related chapters. I want to talk about Bitcoin as the first digital currency without a central authority, born out of the cypherpunk movement and an ideological view of economics. Ethereum built on that to apply similar concepts to cloud computing. And Web3 was the effort to apply these…

I am currently working on capturing the more ideological aspects of the Metaverse. Since the early days of the home computer revolution in the 1980s, there has always been a vocal group that shared an unwavering belief in the ability of computers to empower individuals and communities, to the point where they would usher in…

I have published a first work-in-progress look into the book. The sample chapters are lifted from the section “A new subculture is born”, which describes what led to the cyberpunk genre, how cyberpunk spawned different visions for digital virtual worlds, and how these visions influenced the development of the emerging Internet.

A while ago I posted the sections and chapters of the book here: “Structuring my Field Notes.” This has changed quite a bit recently.

I’m back from vacation!

The interview with Julian Dibbell is in the review stage. We talked about the intersection between the legal realities of virtual worlds and their theoretical potential to be something more – and in that context we have touched upon Web3 as a movement to regain some of the earlier optimism and semi-utopian visions that shaped…

I was on vacation last week, so not much writing happened. However, I was able to meet with Thomas Riedel for a relaxed breakfast. We talked about his podcast Spatial Realities (probably the best Metaverse podcast in German), the current state of spatial computing, and why we do what we do. Thank you, Thomas, we…

I haven’t been writing much, instead spending the time re-organizing my personal notes and sources. But I thought it might be fun to share more about what these sources are and how I use them: What are these “Fieldnotes”, exactly? – Fieldnotes from the Metaverse.

This week I have been thinking a lot about the fieldnotes chapters. These are the chapters that contain my personal notes and perspectives on metaverse topics and milestones. Up until now these have been monolithic blocks at the end of a section.

Writing about Cryptocurrencies and Web3 is messy. Before we start: Yes, I am on the record stating that Blockchains – and by extension cryptocurrencies and Web3 – have nothing to do with the Metaverse. But I’m very aware that many people would disagree with this statement. And since this book is not about my personal…